Ways to Increase Your Blog Traffic: Blog or blogging started out as an online personal journal, but has evolved into an effective digital marketing tool to communicate and connect with audiences, and to hopefully convert them into loyal subscribers and customers. Blogs can increase SEO and drive conversions, but the bloggers must employ effective strategies to transform their blogs into lead magnets.
A blog needs to captivate an audience by providing answers to people’s problems in that niche. Blogs could be about any niche or topic like education or technology. It could be a sub-niche too, like homeschooling under education and/or family, and cybersecurity under technology and/or business.
Creating a blog is not as cumbersome as it used to be. With the help of CMS platforms like WordPress, it is easy to start a blog, whether for personal use, to earn an income, or to augment a bigger website by increasing its engagements. Let current WordPress trends help you start a blog, appeal to your target audience, and drive more traffic to your blog or website.
Check out these ten ways to boost your blog traffic.
10 ways to Boost Blog Traffic
1. Determine your niche and be known as an expert in it.
If people are paying to subscribe to your blogging service, or if somebody hired you to write for them, all the more that you must develop a breadth of knowledge, aptitude, and even passion you have for that particular niche.
Be in the know with what’s trending and what is not. Be familiar with any updates regarding that field or topic.
You cannot be spread too thinly, writing for so many topics. It waters you down as a writer, waters your credibility, and waters down your expertise. People will invest time and even their money for expertise that truly meets their need.
Solidify your credibility as a writer by focusing a niche and publishing high-quality content on topics that are trending for your target market.
2. Set consumer avatars and write content relevant to them.
Consumer avatars are important because it gives direction to what and how you will blog. Through market research, you can discover what your target market is crazy about, or constantly searching for. You will get to know them, their demographics likes and dislikes, and even behavior in buying, browsing, and consuming content.
Create multiple consumer avatars within your target niche and take note of their age, education level, occupation, expertise, tech-savviness. This affects not just your blog content, but even your blog or web design, and your UI/UX. (User interface/User Experience).
3. Commit to write consistently.
In order for your blog to drive traffic, you need to make a commitment to write consistently. Create a blogging calendar so you know when you should be working on an article, and when you should be publishing.
When you publish content consistently, you help your blog to generate traffic. Google search engine favors websites that consistently releases fresh content.
4. Write good-quality content.
For a blog to drive traffic, the writer must be adept and passionate about the niche and the topics within that niche. It makes the content more valuable if there is a level of proficiency upon the writer responding to people’s queries and searches intent.
Good content must carry a personality too, which makes readers feel the blog is personal and sincere. Personal anecdotes or examples relating to the topic from the writer brings a more endearing touch.
Audiences need to feel they are communicating with someone real, and who has genuine knowledge about the topic. People follow people behind a blog or a brand, whether you are an independent blogger or you’re blogging for a brand.
5. Craft eye-catching headlines.
Are your headlines compelling enough that it leads readers to click through your blog site? Headlines or titles need to be eye-catching and persuasive. The competition is tough. Always think about why a reader would choose your blog over others? Let that show in your heading or title.
If your title is bland or vague, readers will skim through it on search engines and will hardly take a second look. It prevents you from being discovered, opposite of what you want if you are aiming to drive traffic to your site. So, your headlines and titles must pack a punch.
Optimize even your meta tags or descriptions to advertisements your blog for free on SERP. It is like a free ad because if you are successful in showing a glimpse of your blog to readers that skim on SERP, then you can drive traffic to your blog.
6. Use keywords strategically in your content.
Blogging is not just about writing well, but writing strategically so you can be discovered on the internet. If nobody finds your blog, then you will not drive blog traffic.
Blog traffic boosts your ranking in SERP (Search Engines Result Page). Bloggers aim for the first-page SERP rankings because readers hardly go to the second page of SERP. They click on the first 3 to 5 organic results, and typically, finding what they need, do not care to browse some more.
To rank in SERP, make sure your blog is SEO-worthy (Search Engine Optimization). It means it gives what search engines are looking for. Search engines look at your blog and check if it meets a particular problem that can help readers searching on their site.
Check the keywords and key phrases currently ranking in your niche. There are free keyword tools like Google Keyword Planner, KeywordTool, Wordtracker, WordStream, and the like. Paid SEO tools like Ahrefs, Ubersuggest, KWFinder, or Moz has keyword search tools as well, and given that these are paid tools, writers will have more in-depth analysis and metrics to guide them.
7. Write evergreen content.
An evergreen content is an SEO content that stays fresh and useful even through time. Ahrefs says that creating evergreen content around evergreen topics helps writers do less work and get regular organic traffic. Writers do not have to change or update the content often, and after a month or two, you will not see a drop in traffic. Your content will keep attracting organic traffic to your post month after month, year after year.
For example, creating an article on “Hot SEO Topics this 2020” has an expiration date, 2020. By 2021, you either need to revise the blog or create a new one. But if you write “5 Reasons You Should Boost Your SEO Strategy,” it will not have to be edited year by year, and remains useful even with the passing of time.
8. Write content in long-form.
Analytics show that long-form content has better results in search engines than short or thin content. Long-form content a highly-worded post, with a minimum of 1,500 to 2,000 words. Since it is lengthy, it is also more detailed, able to respond more in-depth to readers’ queries or search intent.
Since long-form content are have more keywords and key phrases, they have more chances of driving blog traffic. This type of SEO content also do well in ranking for long-tail keyword searches, driving blog traffic even further.
9. Make your blog more engaging with images and videos.
About 43% of readers lightly skim through content before zoning in on the blog or website that fully meets their search intent. Your blog should take full advantage of any leverage it can get to be that choice for the readers, and integrating images and videos to your blog can draw more readers in. It also makes your content share-worthy.
An example of this is Dove’s Real Beauty campaign that used powerful imagery and touching videos along with their blog, web, and social media campaigns.
If you use videos in your blog it can bring 72% increase in conversion. Use high-quality images and videos. You can use photo-editing apps and video-editing apps to help you produce image and video content fast and consistently.
10. Promote your blog on social media.
Know what social media platforms your target audience is using. Each social media platform appeals to certain demographic that may or may not overlap. You need to do your research and create a social media presence for your blog.
For instance, TikTok used to be an app popular among younger millennials, but mostly to Gen X and Gen Y. The pandemic and social distancing measures has catapulted the app’s popularity across a wider range of demographics, not just in age or gender, but even background, economic status, and buying power. As a result, brand promotion on TikTok has become the newest digital marketing strategy for most brands and bloggers.
Since 3.8 billion people are on social media, promoting your blog through different platforms will boost blog traffic. Also find and become engaged in the forums and sites of your target audience. Join the discussion and post links or comment on your blog without being spammy.
You can also request your blog’s subscribers to share your blog. Provide incentives like a free eBook or discount coupons to a product or service being endorsed in your blog. Incentives can even be as simple as a shout out or special mention to your social media blog.
Conclusion: Write Purposefully for People to Drive Blog Traffic
There are a number of different ways to drive more traffic to your blog, but these 10 tips can help you start converting now. Above all, above the need to drive traffic, get leads and conversions, you need to write purposefully for people.
Write with the intent to bring value to people’s lives. At the core of every content you publish, let it be solving people’s problems and adding value to them.